Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam’s Most Eloquent Apostate

The West’s obsession with ‘terror’ has been a mistake, she argues. Dawa, the ideology behind it, is a broader threat.

by Tunku Varadaraian

Mr. Varadarajan is a research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

April 8, 2017 Stanford, Calif.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Ms. Hirsi Ali—now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where I also work—is urging the West to look at Islam with new eyes. She says it must be viewed “not just as a religion, but also as a political ideology.” To regard Islam merely as a faith, “as we would Christianity or Buddhism, is to run the risk of ignoring dawa, the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.”

Dawa, Ms. Hirsi Ali explains, is “conducted right under our noses in Europe, and in America. It aims to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and also to push existing Muslims in a more extreme direction.” The ultimate goal is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah.” It is a “never-ending process,” she says, and then checks herself: “It ends when an Islamic utopia is achieved. Shariah everywhere!”

The woman sitting opposite me, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit and a duck-egg-blue turtleneck, can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard. She is soft-spoken and irrepressibly sane, but also—in the eyes of those who would rather cut her throat than listen to what she says—the most dangerous foe of Islamist extremism in the Western world. We are in a secure room at a sprawling university, but the queasiness in my chest takes a while to go away. I’m talking to a woman with multiple fatwas on her head, someone who has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I’ve met (Salman Rushdie included). And yet she’s wholly poised, spectacles pushed back to rest atop her head like a crown, dignified and smiling under siege.

ILLUSTRATION:ZINA SAUNDERS

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate. She has just published a slim book that seeks to add a new four-letter word—dawa—to the West’s vocabulary. It describes the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad. It is, she says, the greatest threat facing the West and “could well bring about the end of the European Union as we know it.” America is far from immune, and her book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late.”

Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

By James Simpson James Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst. His writings have been published in American Thinker, Washington Times, FrontPage Magazine, Defense Watch, Soldier of Fortune and others.

America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.

Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama’s connections to his radical mentors — Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and hisDiscover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama’s radical connections since the beginning.

Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama’s life comprise a who’s who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.

But even this doesn’t fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.

I submit to you they understand the consequences. For many it is simply a practical matter of eliciting votes from a targeted constituency at taxpayer expense; we lose a little, they gain a lot, and the politician keeps his job. But for others, the goal is more malevolent – the failure is deliberate. Don’t laugh. This method not only has its proponents, it has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It describes their agenda, tactics, and long-term strategy.

I have been hearing about “The Frankfurt School” for 4 – 5 years and this is the best article that I have found so far on how their Marxist ideology is trying to reshape our country. Please click on the link for the complete article. This article explains how the Far Left has succeeded in dismantling our traditional core values.

A chapter in Andrew Breitbart’s last book, “Righteous Indignation” concerns The Frankfurt School (a group of Marxist scholars who fled Germany in the 1930’s and came to America and started to infiltrate our universities to spread their Marxist ideology. .

EXCERPT FROM THE ARTICLE: In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of “Marxism” that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system.

The theory holds that these self-interested Jews — the so-called “Frankfurt School” of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, “family values,” and so on — are reactionary and bigoted. With their core values thus subverted, the theory goes, Americans would be quick to sign on to the ideas of the far left.

Marcuse was the philosophical hero of the New Left in the 1960s; at marches in Paris, they carried banners that read “Marx, Mao and Marcuse.” As Andrew Breitbart described Herbert Marcuse in Righteous Indignation:

Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse’s theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer’s critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement–Gender Studies, LGBT/”Queer” Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these “Blank Studies” brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and placing in their stead a moral relativism that equates all cultures and all philosophies–except for Western civilization, culture, and philosophy, which are “exploitative” and “bad.”

IBD Editorials

Obama’s Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed

Boston Bombers

Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won’t snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are.

That’s right, the government’s sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret. (more…)

Maryland Department of Corrections asks a candidate for his Facebook password.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: A recent revision in the handbook at the University of North Carolina is typical:

“Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings,” it reads. “The athletics department also reserves the right to have other staff members monitor athletes’ posts.”

Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and some are demanding full access from job applicants and student athletes.

In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state’s Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall.

Previously, applicants were asked to surrender their user name and password, but a complaint from the ACLU stopped that practice last year. While submitting to a Facebook review is voluntary, virtually all applicants agree to it out of a desire to score well in the interview, according Maryland ACLU legislative director Melissa Coretz Goemann.

Student-athletes in colleges around the country also are finding out they can no longer maintain privacy in Facebook communications because schools are requiring them to “friend” a coach or compliance officer, giving that person access to their “friends-only” posts. Schools are also turning to social media monitoring companies with names like UDilligence and Varsity Monitor for software packages that automate the task. The programs offer a “reputation scoreboard” to coaches and send “threat level” warnings about individual athletes to compliance officers. (more…)

‘Lawfare’ Loses Big

The ACLU loses its nasty suit against former defense officials.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: But the lawyers suing for Padilla aren’t interested in justice. They’re practicing “lawfare,” which is an effort to undermine the war on terror by making U.S. officials afraid to pursue it for fear of personal liability. The ACLU and the rest of the legal left have failed to persuade several Congresses and two Administrations to agree to their anti-antiterror policies. So instead they’re suing former officials in civilian court to harass them and damage their reputations. It’s shameful stuff, and if it succeeds it would have the effect of making Pentagon officials look over their shoulder at potential lawsuits every time they had to make a difficult military or interrogation decision

The guerrilla legal campaign against national security suffered a big defeat this week, and the good news deserves more attention. The victory for legal sanity came Monday when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court decision to toss out a suit brought by aspiring terrorist Jose Padilla against a slew of Bush Administration officials.

Readers may remember that Padilla was arrested in 2002 for plotting to set off a dirty bomb on U.S. soil. He was detained as an enemy combatant, convicted in a Miami court and sentenced to 17 years in prison. But Padilla has been adopted as a legal mascot by the ACLU and the National Litigation Project at Yale Law School, which have sued far and wide alleging mistreatment and lack of due process. (more…)

Conservative Congressional Candidate Bill Randall was the victim of a hate crime when one of his large campaign signs was graffitied with racist slogans. This parody is based on an ACTUAL INCIDENT that took place in early Oct 2011. Ironically, the location was less than 50 miles to the east of the infamous “Duke lacrosse” scandal, in which charges against that sports team were fabricated and unsubstantiated. Yet, in this incident (with obvious facts and evidence), the Liberal media has ignored the story because it does not fit the strawman template of rampant racism and bigotry in the Tea Party.

KNIGHT: Snuffing out children’s innocence

ACLU agenda aims to taint children

If you were the devil, what would be your most important mission, other than inventing false religions? It would be to corrupt innocent children.

I’d start by kicking God out of the public schools and excising from textbooks the truth about America’s deeply Christian heritage. I’d get rid of glaringly obvious ties between Christianity and the Founders’ vision of unalienable rights and limited government. Children would be indoctrinated to think of themselves as cosmic accidents of random mutation and survival of the fittest, not precious beings with eternal souls created in the image of God. The result would be an effectively atheistic system of moral relativism.

Next, I’d cloak sexual promiscuity in terms of self-fulfillment, mix it up with junk science and lobby the teachers unions to openly promote the Kinsey sex education model of children as “sexual beings” whose “orientation” has no moral relevance.

Finally, I’d expose the kids to outright propaganda through clever websites designed to promote deviance and to brand anyone with any qualms, such as parents, as hate-filled bigots and bullies.

If any school districts resisted, I’d slap them with legal threats. And that’s where the devil’s law firm comes in.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is running around the country, shaking its fists at school districts and demanding that kids be exposed to whatever the homosexual movement deems appropriate. In Prince William County, Va., after an ACLU threat, school officials removed the filter blocking homosexual websites. The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, has sent letters to eight school districts, including Prince William, advising them that they have every right to keep the filters. But Prince William has caved, at least for now. (more…)

Use of filters a rights issue

A fierce legal battle on free speech and family values is brewing about Internet filters used by school administrators to block students’ access to gay educational and advocacy websites.

Gay rights groups say school systems cannot impose blanket bans on gay-related informational and cultural websites on school computers, while values groups warn that the absence of the blocking filters could leave children exposed to sexually explicit material.

“There is no legitimate reason why any public school should be using an anti-LGBT filter,” said Joshua Block, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) Project and leader of the “Don’t Filter Me” campaign.

The ACLU has sent warning letters to many school districts, including Prince William County Public Schools in Virginia, advising them that Internet filters blocking nonsexual gay websites are unconstitutional and must be removed to “avoid any potential litigation.”

But David Cortman, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which defends traditional values organizations, counters that “school districts shouldn’t be bullied into exposing students to sexually explicit materials.” (more…)